On Media

Why Jill Abramson was fired

By DYLAN BYERS

05/17/2014 11:11 PM EDT

From my report on why Jill Abramson was fired from The New York Times:

New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger fired executive editor Jill Abramson after concluding that she had misled both him and chief executive Mark Thompson during her effort to hire a new co-managing editor, according to two sources with knowledge of the reason for her termination.

While several factors contributed to Sulzberger’s frustration with Abramson’s management of the newsroom, the sources, who are sympathetic to the Times management, said it was this incident that sealed her fate.

In conversations and emails, Abramson led both Sulzberger and Thompson to believe that she had consulted with other newsroom leaders about her decision to offer The Guardian’s Janine Gibson a job as co-managing editor, the sources said. Specifically, they said she implied that both Dean Baquet, her managing editor, and Janet Elder, the deputy managing editor responsible for newsroom resources and staff development, had been informed and were on board with the plan.

In fact, the sources said, Abramson had not consulted Baquet or Elder about her decision. Baquet did not learn about the offer until he was informed by Gibson herself at a lunch meeting — at which point the offer had already been made, the sources said. When Baquet voiced his frustration to Sulzberger the following day, the publisher concluded that his executive editor had misled him, and moved to fire her later that week.

Abramson did not respond to a request for an interview regarding her termination. Sulzberger, Thompson, Baquet and Gibson and Eileen Murphy, the Times’ chief spokesperson, all declined to comment.

The handling of Abramson’s exit from the paper was widely criticized as graceless: Abramson was not in the newsroom when Sulzberger announced the transfer of power to Baquet, and very little was said about her tenure. Howell Raines, who had been forced out eleven years earlier after overseeing a plagiarism scandal, was given gentler treatment.

In a statement issued Saturday, Sulzberger said that he fired Abramson after she proved unable to improve upon problems with her management style, which had been the subject of complaints by her colleagues.

“During her tenure, I heard repeatedly from her newsroom colleagues, women and men, about a series of issues, including arbitrary decision-making, a failure to consult and bring colleagues with her, inadequate communication and the public mistreatment of colleagues,” Sulzberger said. “I discussed these issues with Jill herself several times and warned her that, unless they were addressed, she risked losing the trust of both masthead and newsroom.”

“She acknowledged that there were issues and agreed to try to overcome them. We all wanted her to succeed,” he continued. “It became clear, however, that the gap was too big to bridge and ultimately I concluded that she had lost the support of her masthead colleagues and could not win it back.”

Sulzberger decided that “the gap was too big to bridge” when he concluded that Abramson had misled both him and Thompson about having consulted Baquet and Elder on the Gibson offer, the sources told POLITICO after the statement was released.

“The clear implication was that Dean and Janet had been told and endorsed the specifics of the plan for Janine,” a high-level Times source said. “They had not.”

Several Times sources, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, added new details regarding Abramson’s ouster in background conversations and correspondence.